Watergate at 40: Nixon White House was 'criminal enterprise'

3:33 p.m. EST, June 10, 2012|By Hal Boedeker, Staff writer

The Watergate cover-up wasn't worse than the crimes, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein stressed Sunday on "Face the Nation." The Washington Post reporters who brought down Richard Nixon's presidency marked the 40th anniversary of the Watergate break-in with the TV chat and a major story in Sunday's Post.

"The crimes were enormous, and that's what the tapes show and they go back to the first days of the Nixon administration. He wiretapped. Presidential orders involved setting up a burglary squad and a wiretapping squad," Bernstein told CBS'Bob Schieffer. "They wiretapped a reporter in 1969. But really what we found is that his White House became, to a remarkable extent, a criminal enterprise such as we've never had in our history."

Woodward noted that 40 people went to jail in the Watergate saga. For its latest report, the Post drew on Nixon's tapes.

"Nixon believed that you use the presidency as an instrument of personal avenge or reward," Woodward said. "It was always about Nixon and the real tragedy about all of this probably crimes, abuse, but the smallness of it and Nixon failed to realize that particularly when he took over as president in '69 in the early months that the country felt even Democrats, good will we want our president to succeed. He immediately launched the campaign of let's spy on people, let's do something dirty and there was never that sense of let's harmonize and solve the big problems. It was always let's screw somebody, let's get the IRS on them, let's get the FBI on them."

Schieffer said that President Gerald Ford once told him that Nixon had never thanked him for a full pardon.

Woodward said he asked Ford about the pardon. "He finally said, 'I didn't do it for Nixon, I didn't do it for myself, I did it for the country.' We had to get over Watergate," Woodward said.

Woodward highlighted that their latest reporting showed that Nixon had launched five wars as president. "The first against the anti-war movement, the second against the press, the third against the Democrats who threatened to take over the White House from him and deny him a second term," Woodward told Schieffer. "And then the fourth when there was the Watergate burglary, the cover-up, the obstruction of justice. And then interestingly enough, Nixon never stopped the fifth war, which is against history, to say oh no it really is not what it shows on the tapes and all the testimony and evidence."